Staff Engineer - Recommendations

What You'll Do

• Work within a full-stack team of engineers to develop, maintain, and optimize scalable data pipelines, backend services, and APIs for data-driven features like recommendations, content discovery, groups, and events in VRChat.
• Design and implement data models and schemas that support both analytical needs and real-time recommendation systems.
• Collaborate with data scientists, product managers, and other engineers to ensure the correct data is captured, processed, and available to power meaningful user experiences.
• Implement and maintain data processing jobs using big data technologies (e.g., Spark, Kafka) to handle large-scale datasets.
• Contribute to the evolution of our technical and product capabilities, helping to progress from simple heuristics to more sophisticated, data-backed personalization for content and experiences.
• Participate in the design and implementation of backend systems including REST and websocket APIs, caching systems, queueing systems, and cloud orchestration.
• Be available to occasionally jump into action to solve an outage.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in software engineering, with a strong focus on data engineering and building scalable backend systems for SaaS products or online platforms.
• Proven experience building and optimizing production-grade data pipelines (ETL/ELT).Strong proficiency in SQL and experience with database optimization for both analytical queries and high-throughput real-time access.
• Experience with big data technologies such as Spark, Hadoop/Beam, or Kafka.
• Experience with cloud providers at scale, such as AWS or Google Cloud.
• Able to work in a variety of languages and technologies, such as Python, JavaScript/Node.js, Mongo, and Redis.
• Experience with Elasticsearch, data warehousing, and machine learning (ML) systems.
• An agile, collaborative mindset and excellent communication skills, capable of working effectively in a remote, cross-functional team environment.

Bonus Points

• Experience building and scaling aspects of content discovery or recommendation systems.
• Demonstrated interest in online communities, VR, or VRChat (as a user or creator). Knowing how our platform and community works will be helpful for this role.
• Experience with social networks, social graphs, or systems dealing with user-generated content.
• Experience working on consumer products, e-commerce, or two-sided marketplaces.

Benefits

• Work from anywhere! VRChat is a 100% remote company offering flexible working hours in combination with core hours supporting real-time collaboration
• Health Benefits
• 401K for US & Group RRSP for Canadian Employees
• Stock Options
• Generous paid holiday schedule
• Unlimited/flexible vacation time
• Paid parental leave benefits